Sounding
quite like nothing you have heard before, The Excelsiors come correct with
their debut album, Control This. The latest project from Shane ‘Sureshot’ Hunt,
known for his Sharpshooters group, and for his highly-regarded Soundbwoy Reggae
Breaks series wherein he has liberally dropped science, sharing his in-depth
knowledge of ska, rock-steady, reggae and dancehall for the instruction of the
hip-hop massive, The Excelsiors is the logical extension of Shane’s passion for
classic Jamaican music (and more) of the ‘60s through ‘80s.
At a
time when seemingly everything is made using the same software packages,
Control This is a defiantly old-school, analogue record,dispensing with the
uniform polish and sheen of contemporary production methods and instead
showcasing an array of ‘real’ instruments and a variety of styles and moods. In
the mix are not just bass, drums and guitars and some real antique keyboard
sounds but percussion including steel pans, organ, horns, backing vocals, and
even strings! All new music, cut live to tape and then seamlessly pieced
together across an album of (mostly) cover versions, a living link with the
music that was the inspiration for the project. Sounding like something that
would be very expensive to produce in this day and age, the finished result
nevertheless retains a rawness and gusto that virtually leaps out of the
speakers.
Nor is
this simply a reggae album –in fact, here we have Sureshot bringing together a
whole array of cultural influences, in a lively mash-up style. Vocals come from
northern soul/disco legend The Mighty Pope and Omega Rae of Blackalicious,
coming from opposite ends of about four decades of black music styles. Mrs.
Magic is the Grover Washington Jr. jazz-funk staplegiven a gender
re-assignment, and an earthy reggae treatment: Esther Philips, Roberta Flack
and even Amy Winehouse have previously recorded vocal versions atop this killer
rhythm, this is how it might’ve sounded if Toots and The Maytals had done it at
the time it came out, raucous and intense.
Carole
King’s It’s Too Late has been covered notably by Dennis Brown in reggae and the
Isley Brothers in soul. It’s given a reggae groove but its strings and deep
backing vocals bring to mind classic ‘70s soul. It takes a particularly fertile
imagination (and an extensive record collection) to think of versioning Debbie
Deb’s freestyle classic Look Out Weekend as a sprawling, organic Afrobeat tune…
Shane Hunt is clearly the man with that imagination! Check the fierce horns
here.
Similarly,
Barrington Levy’s Here I Come, the digital-dancehall tune to end them all, is
here re-imagined as a hugely infectious ‘live’ jam …try listening to this
without breaking into a grin, it’s so ‘wrong’ and yet so right! Thom Bell and
Linda Creed’s People Make The World Go Round has been covered countless times
since its original Stylistics version, and seems to have more resonance than
most of the classic Philly era with contemporary listeners. The Excelsiors’
version might not even be the first version to use steel pans, but it
definitely is the first to combine such instrumentation with a vaguely
psychedelelic, eastern drone. Essential version!
The version of Gene Rondo’s A
Land Far Away acknowledges its debt to the greatest of all reggae anthems, the
Abyssinians’ Satta Massagana … while This Is Sunshine Music is a funky-soul
version of This Is Reggae Music by the under-rated Zap-Pow. The optimism and
yearning of the former is tempered with dark psychedelic elements making it
stand out dramatically from other versions. The great era of conscious roots
reggae is brought back to life with a bang with these unexpected covers. The
script is flipped with a cover of The Beat’s Mirror In The Bathroom, a classic
from the two-tone era, given a digital rhythm.
Two-tone
marked the definitive arrival of a new multicultural generation as a
distinctively British creative force… a splash still rippling to this day, with
projects like The Excelsiors. As well as Shane’s version of a traditional
spiritual, named here Soon I Will Be Done, he also shows his own songwriting
prowess with a couple of originals, In The Name Of The Father and Cold As
Steel, demonstrating influences from gutbucket funk to island music.
This is
an accomplished work, essentially the creative inspiration of one man, with
some very talented musicians on board, and with its phenomenal ‘live’ sound
definitely marks this producer out as an artist to watch in his own right.
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